The Secret Garden (2020)

Following the death of her parents around the time of the Partition of India and Pakistan, and a short stint in a pretty Dickensian establishment for orphans, young Mary (Dixie Egerickx, yet another extremely focussed and convincing child actress – I wonder where they breed them) is shipped to the decaying British country estate of her uncle Archibald Craven (Colin Firth).

Craven, driven into a rather serious depression by the death of his wife a couple of years ago, actually has very little time for the girl, leaving her in the hands of his pretty nasty housekeeper Mrs Medlock (Julie Walters) and the rather more pleasant maid Martha (Isis Davis). Mary herself is suffering from PTSD thanks to the circumstances of the late life and death of her parents, finding herself a stranger in that strange England, having to cope not just with loneliness but also the difficulty of trying to understand the new rules governing one’s life when nobody deigns to actually explain them to one.

Mary, it turns out, fortunately is a very resilient – as well as an often pretty arrogant and a bit spoiled - child, finding solace running wild on the moors and in the woods (which must be the height of the exotic to her eyes). Eventually, she discovers a hidden garden on the estate. The garden will turn out to be place of healing not just for her but for all the gothic brokenness she discovers surrounding her; and Mary will turn out to be rather good at sharing that place with others, even if she has to drag them.

How much you enjoy Marc Munden’s very free adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved children’s book will probably depend on how willing you are to accept the sweeping changes the script by Jack Thorne makes to the source material. I’m rather of two minds about these changes. At least half of them seem to me to be textbook examples of how to properly change elements of a classic to adapt to a new time, new mores and changed audience tastes and ideas, so the film’s treatment of things like class, race and trauma is much more contemporary than in the book, without the film being an ass about it, and certainly a good way to treat the material today.

The other half of the changes, on the other hand, does pull the very genteel source material much deeper into high Gothic melodrama, the sort of thing that can’t not end with a dramatically burning mansion. These are obviously the sort of changes bound to annoy (or violently incense, given the always angry times we live in – the Hulk Age?) the fans of the book looking for an adaptation that may not keep to the details but to the tone of the book. As someone who hasn’t grown up with the Burnett’s writing, it not being the sort of thing read by German children, I find myself raising my eyebrows at some of these decisions a little, but will naturally have an easier time simply accepting them.

Munden does make this acceptance rather easy for me, too, for he is very good at creating a mood of gothic decay surrounding the Craven mansion, suggesting a place rotting away with the sorrows of its dwellers, full of hidden secrets, hidden doors, and even a hidden boy, left by a father whose own mental illness makes it impossible for him to see him clearly or treat him as even a mediocre father should. In this house, all things representing the memory of happier times are hidden away to be found by a courageous little snoop like Mary who hasn’t yet learned the art of repression but faces most of her troubles head-on. The film sells this so well, it even can convince me of that most horrible of things, helpful ghosts; but then, the memories and thoughts of one’s deceased loved ones bringing release and beauty even more than they do pain if you only let them is one of the points of the movie, so helpful ghosts are perfectly fit for the film at hand.

The film does make rather a lot out of the contrasts in light and colour between the mansion - always dark, of course, unless some memory or kindness lets a light in –, the lighter but somewhat bleak and dangerous countryside, and the better than natural brightness and beauty of the Secret Garden. Visually, the house gets all the Gothic colours and shapes of that darker side of Romanticism, whereas the moors are portrayed naturalistic, and the Garden carries the sheen of the brightest Romanticism. As a metaphor, it’s all a bit obvious, of course, but Munden’s visual realisation of the concept is so convincing obviousness doesn’t really feel like a problem.


One might also complain about the film being a bit too nice to its characters, providing them with wounds that heal too clearly and too quickly, but in the decades of the Grimdark Dystopia, I’m pretty fine with a film suggesting that lives can actually change for the better. Curious, I know. Must be my age.